I'm off to Santiago for a couple of days to get my plane to New Zealand. I have to say the airport is a true reflection of La Paz. We get to check in and it is closed and opens an hour after it is suppose to. Then at the desk they take my passport into a backroom... I have a feeling some Bolivan is now also called Sarah-Jayne Moulton. They don't put my bag on the belt, so I have to ask them 3 times before they put it with the rest of the lugagge! Our flight stops at Iquique and we are told to get off the plane to go through immigration and have our bags scanned again, only to get back on the same plane! We arrived in Santiago and shcokingly it is quite warm, I was expecting Buenos Aires weather. We go for Chinese in Santiago, which the menu is written in 'chinese-spanish' and the waitress only speaks Spanish. Unfortantely my dictionary doesn't cover chinese food! I am really craving chicken chow mein or sweat and sour and in the end get something that looks like chicken and spinach! There are not many dogs in Santiago so I suspect it was spinach and dog!

11/08/2009

Spent the morning sigtseeing then the afternoon in a French resturant drinking wine. Fuelled with wine my Dad purchases a blowpipe, I think the lady in the shop was getting a little annoyed with how many times he asked for the poison to put on the ends. hmmmm... I wonder if I should get one to take to Oz, wooden with sharp points, that has to break some of their rules!

12/08/2009

I fly to New Zealand today, so it may be wise to find an internet cafe to book my hostel in Auckland. I also wanted a lonely planet book and there was a couple of English bookshops about 4 miles away. We walk all the way to the shops to find that the first shop sold the book yesterday and won't have another for 2 days and the second only has a copy from 1996... the whole of New Zealand could have been knocked down and rebuilt since then! I decided to go to the Airport with my Dad even though his flight to England is 7 hours before mine, as he is paying for the taxi and there is not much to do around Santiago. I love being at the airport but I think I was there a tad long!After looking around the shops, eating, drinking wine and people watching... i'm BORED! I sit by departures people watching and either people from Chile don't travel much or just like having their pictures taken by departures with all their luggage! While sitting there some boy keeps staring at me, to the point he gets nicknames scary stary boy, so I go through departures 4 hours before my flight! The only thing to do there is drink more wine. To be fair it would be rather rude to visit Chile and not try all the wine they have to offer! The flight was so bizzare, not only do I skip a whole day (I wonder if 13th August was a good day?!) but it was all in darkness. We took off in the dark and it was still dark until 2 hours after I arrived at the hostel in Auckland!